Restoration literature is the literature written in English during the period commonly referred to as the English Restoration, corresponding with the last years of the direct Stuart reign in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In general, the term is used to denote roughly homogeneous styles of literature that centre on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II. It is a literature that includes extremes, for it encloses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. It saw news become a commodity, the essay develop into a periodical artform, the beginnings of textual criticism, and the emergence of the stock market. Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_literature _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 1778: Captain James Cook discovered the Sandwich Islands, now known as Hawaii. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hawaii) 1871: King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed the first Kaiser of the German Empire, a newly unified nation state. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_I_of_Germany) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire) 1958: Willie O'Ree of the Boston Bruins played his first game in the National Hockey League, breaking the color barrier in professional ice hockey. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_O'Ree) 1977: The mysterious Legionnaires' disease was found to be caused by a novel bacterium now known as Legionella. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionellosis) 2003: The Canberra Firestorm: Bushfires burning out of control began blazing through residential areas of Canberra, Australia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra_bushfires_of_2003) _____________________ Wikiquote of the day: It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. -- Robert Anton Wilson (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson)